The life and times of Richard Windsor, alter ego of erstwhile EPA chief

Erika JohnsenPosted at 3:21 pm on February 15, 2013

Hey, remember — oh, I don’t know — yesterday, when President Obama munificently reminded us that his administration is in fact, as promised, The Most Transparent Administration,Evah?

Lolz.

Outgoing EPA chief Lisa Jackson bid farewell to her administrative duties yesterday, but we’re still trying to figure out the exact nature of her longtime e-mail alias for internal EPA business, one Richard Windsor. Last year, we learned that Jackson had been using this .gov alias to conduct business on behalf of her extremely zealous and costly regulation-happy independent agency, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute is still waiting for the fulfillment of their Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent lawsuit. The Daily Caller has the word from CEI, waiting to see if the EPA will comply with today’s deadline for releasing the next tranche of e-mails:

If today’s delivery of emails from the EPA is anything like the tranche CEI received in January, it will not provide any valuable information about how Jackson employed her Richard Windsor email account. Indeed, the delivery we received in January — 2,100 emails total, significantly shy of the promised 3,000 — consisted entirely of Google news alerts and press clippings.

When asked why 2,100 emails satisfied the EPA’s promise to process “approximately 3,000 emails” per month from the false-identity account, the Department of Justice informed CEI that they had withheld the other 900. In full. Not one word released, not even the factual information — such as To and From fields — that all agencies must release of all but the most highly classified public records.

Hmm — I wonder what possible point and purpose an alias e-mail account might have served for a high-profile environmental administrator responsible for waging costly regulatory warfare against energy forms not within the realm of Obama’s political favor? And if she really has nothing to hide, why wouldn’t you just turn over all of the e-mails in the first place?

I’ll post an update if/when it comes, but I have serious doubts in my mind that the EPA will reveal anything that they’ve predetermined could be damning to their rep before they feel like it — they are part of the Obama administration, after all. They do what they want.